No Lament for the Lost
by crackinthecup
Summary: The isle of Himling is a remnant of a world lost beneath the waves. For Maglor it is a much more personal reminder. An attempt to answer the eternal question: What happened to Maglor after the First Age?


**Disclaimer: **Not mine.

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Rumor and mist chilled the coasts of Lindon. Tales told by men in dusty voices, of ghosts and ships and a morning of storm and fury. Outcasts they were, imposing exile upon themselves, too old now for the fledgling glory of new-sprung Númenor, gazing ever westward for a world now lost to the blind depths of the sea. Elves seldom journeyed so far north from the Havens, but when they did, they sat together, the Firstborn and the Secondborn, and passed whispers like a frayed rope through the fog. The Firstborn knew little more, for there were few alive who knew him as more than a specter with a haunting voice. But they spoke of the lonely isle of Himling and its ghost-trodden shores, and cast their eyes westward as the sun drowned the hazy speck of land in blood.

He went away many years ago, while the Ring was still a shadow of malice in the mind of its creator, before the earth trembled with the wrath of war. Maglor Fëanorion stood on the gray, damp sand of the northernmost reaches of Lindon and built himself a dinghy. Rudimentary in craft it was, too shabby to brave the feckless sea, but as he labored and sang softly to himself of vessels wrought in the majesty of swans dripping obscene and bloody as the foretoken of doom, he found that he could not summon the energy to care. Any end would be better than this.

Maglor clambered aboard in the gray, diffuse light of a morning with no dawn. Great clouds lowered overhead, gorged with the fumes and mists belched by the earth. Thunder rumbled somewhere far away, and it rolled like a drum struck beneath turf and stone.

Thus he set sail due north-west, half wishing for the violence and the storm. He sang as he rowed, but the rising wind snatched the song off his lips and cast his words in the bosom of chaos, to mingle with the voices of the sea. He thought of the twins, and his heart constricted painfully in his chest, but through the agony and the wreckage that stuffed him upright, the ruined, pale glimmer of a smile touched the corners of his lips. They were better off without him, without _them_. Without their curse and devastation.

He thought also of writhing currents of lava, of _goodbye_ handed out in soft, broken words trampled beneath the groan of rock. And he knew in his heart he had not his brother's strength.

Waves tossed the boat as though it were driftwood. He did not fight the pull of the water, but dropped down into the wooden shelter of the flimsy stern and waited. As he flexed his fingers through the phantom burn of the holy jewel, he thought of death; of water seething in his lungs, the shimmer of consciousness quavering and fading. The prospect did not frighten him.

But that was not to be his end. Through the slow, churning hours the brutality of the tempest petered out. The skies cleared with the cool breath of evening. Weary, shredded clouds scurried away, and stars opened up in the inky blackness overhead like the eyeholes of bright, indifferent gods. One among them overshadowed all the rest, glowing with a steady, fierce light.

And beneath that light Maglor was washed up on the rocky shores of Himling in a boat with splintered timbers. He stumbled out of the wooden carcass and slipped on slimy shingle. Ruins and memories marched away before him, hollow, leafless trees and crumbled battlements and fair heights of stone with windows gaping into dark nothingness.

Maglor plummeted to his knees, a cry without breath shriveled on his lips. The impact rocked through him, jarring through flesh and bone, and he remained kneeling in perverse reverence to this shattered mausoleum.

And then he howled. A broken songbird, with throat raw and bleeding and useless. He shrieked out this aching, subsuming grief to the uncaring skies, and finally, _finally_ felt tears cleave hot and empty to his cheeks.

_I'm sorry_, he longed to say to the ghost with a shock of copper hair. Ever it was by his side, but here—here he could feel it quivering on the verge of coalescence, amid the decay and the past.

Numbly he pushed himself off the ground and staggered onward, upward. He remembered this balcony, now half sunk in the living rock, with stonework crumbled, forever trailing, forever dripping. He remembered the lies he had shoved squirming off his tongue until they became toneless, automatic, sitting here and gazing north with whatever had remained of Maedhros. He remembered this chamber where he had sat in vigil by his brother's bedside, gingerly wriggling the numbness out of the fingers Maedhros clutched so tightly. He remembered the silent twitch of his lips, the flicker of his eyes behind their shuttered lids as nightmares dug the hooks of old horrors through his flesh, as hysteria nudged him into thrashing, screaming wakefulness. He remembered the candlelight, flaring fitfully with the dribble of wax, shying away from Maedhros' scars as shadows clustered in the dipping hollows of his skin until they gaped open like ravines eroded by years of cruelty. Now the room seemed to slump, no longer proud, no longer enduring, bedaubed with grime and mold and the burden of the past.

Thus Maglor wandered, living in a shadow land of memories and silent towers crowned only with wreaths of mist. The revolution of years did not heed him and his aching song echoing up into the heavens.

Slowly he was forgotten, and those who had looked for his coming returned with ever-waning hope, until one day they did not return at all.

And when the cataracts wailed, and the sea unleashed its fury, and the glory of Númenor tumbled rotting into the abyss, all he could think of was the strangeness of home and the pulsing, gutting sense of _finally _slamming itself against his mind. He did not flee from the rushing waves. He sought nothing to cling to amid faint sickness and the frothing, roiling tumult of water. And thus he perished in indiscriminate havoc with neither song nor lament to hallow his memory.


End file.
